MAGALIE COMEAU

Johanna Fateman, Magalie Comeau, The New yorker

Like architectural renderings beamed to earth from another galaxy, Comeau’s precise paintings appear to depict fragments of ancient structures, adrift in a haze: delicately articulated columns of crystal and vapor, a forbidding monument, a ruined temple. Using hybrid geological-geometric forms and color schemes of grisaille or sepia, she channels the mid-century Bay Area painter Jay DeFeo’s abstract surrealism. But there is a photographic quality, too—a sci-fi realism—to these strange works. Although the canvases in Comeau’s first solo show outside of Canada are unarguably stark, her singular imagination and facility with paint are impressive, especially when she captures the diaphanous magic of dusk and the creeping light of daybreak.

Will Henrich Webb, Magalie Comeau, The New York Times

Magalie Comeau works slowly. Her paintings reveal themselves slowly, too. Each canvas in “New and Recent Paintings,” at Mitchell Algus Gallery, her first New York solo show and one of the few times she’s shown outside her native Quebec, is a black, white or rosy beige monochrome interrupted by a complication of intersecting shadows.

Inside this complication there may be a stark figment of architecture. In “De la Profondeur du Lave-Temps de l’Horloge Hystérésique aux Champs de Mains,” it’s a tiny, uninhabited suburban interior. But this bit of bounded space serves mainly to emphasize the unbounded emptiness around it, adding a note of theatricality to the painting’s spacey transcendence. (Imagine an avant-garde monologue about death whose relentless focus is strangely soothing.) Even the pieces without such explicit figuration have auras of architectural allusion. Sharp-edged but shadowy zones of overlapping color evoke drywall, masking tape or slightly stuffy house paint samples. More broadly, the pieces also bring to mind the installations of the Light and Space movement — with the critical difference that, both because of the way they’re painted and simply because they’re paintings, they aren’t trying to determine every aspect of a visitor’s experience. Instead, they're waiting patiently to be fallen into.

“Cachettes Votives aux Dimensions Insaisissables,” my own favorite, is an 84-inch-square black lozenge with a thick shaft of whites and grays pouring down just right of center. It’s hard to focus on but impossible to look away from.

Nancy Webb, Différences évanouissantes

Magalie Comeau’s surreal architectures recall the shadow worlds of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In Calvino’s book, the explorer Marco Polo describes to the emperor Kublai Kahn the 55 magical cities that he has visited in his journeys, each in dazzling imaginative detail:

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses it toward the outside.1

These invented worlds are annexed throughout the book’s nine chapters to themes such as Memory and Desire, which speak to the breadth of human experience. Similarly, Magalie Comeau’s work explores the relationship between space and embodied experience. Her nebulous spaces, which hang suspended in the pitch black or frozen in deep expanses of white canvas, fabricate realities out of half-remembered shapes that signal interiority. These are not clearly defined iterations of space—shopping mall, office, bedroom, attic, for example—but decontextualized inner sanctums.

Gradients of light vaguely delineate the features of these interior realms, creating a voyeuristic feeling, like looking in on a row of quietly illuminated living rooms on a suburban street at night. Comeau’s luminous geometries also deftly imitate the gauzy effect of daylight slicing through cracks in the walls of a darkened room, where dust particles tend to float lazily. It is liberating to thwart the inevitability of organized space—to attempt to undo the bureaucratization of space by dreaming up imaginary architectures. Différences évanouissantes does this work of clouding the familiar logic of space. Comeau creates otherworldly coves that reconsider the way spaces ought to behave. Rather than being stable, legible and controlled, might spaces instead possess shapeshifting abilities? Spatial uncertainty is represented here by interstices and shadowy folds—the spaces-in-between that typically go unnoticed.

These dense but precise clusters, skillfully rendered in oil paint, feature repeated elements. They are like parts of a scattered map. Visual repetitions get snagged in the soup of memory; remembrances of specific rooms run thick in the mind (seem opaque and unchanging) but are always fleeting, always flawed. Like memory, Comeau’s work communicates in fragments—a glimpse here, a pinhole view into another reality there. Her paintings challenge the objectivity of place. Each is a reminder that we build our own experiential frameworks on top of our environments. Like secret scripts, our embodied memories and desires define the places that we inhabit.

Marsha Taichman, The Poetry of Space in Magalie Comeau’s Paintings

Magalie Comeau is an explorer. She finds spaces and scrutinizes them, taking time to mull over and dissect them in her mind. She then thoughtfully re-pieces these sites on her canvases. Rather than capturing the walls and floors of a building as they would appear in three-point perspective, Comeau twists and turns architecture, cross-sectioning and bending interiors outwards while further complicating her multifaceted horizons by subdividing the rooms, confusing inside and outside. They are dizzying propositions, and when she claims to have been visually overloaded from her investigations, I am not inclined to argue. She looks at how bodies (her own and others) interact with space, how we react and respond to the places that we inhabit. She thinks of these physical structures as distinct personalities that she is responding to, and that these skewed rooms become presences akin to people.

These paintings evoke the city, its buildings and inhabitants. They are also reminiscent of the city’s grit, its dust clouds and the sprays of graffiti so prevalent in urban environments. Yet other images seem tranquil, dusky and domestic. Comeau does not choose one particular type of place to dissect and repurpose. In her recent work Le vertige de l’architactrice, the centre of the image is a room with diffuse natural light and hardwood floors, evoking some kind of habitable structure. The setting is so welcoming that it becomes familiar.

The execution of Comeau’s paintings is stunning, demonstrating a patient craftsmanship. She paints with oil in order to build complex colours and smooth blending. One element of her oeuvre that is extremely striking is her capacity for hard-edged painting. To achieve such sharp lines and well-defined shapes with oil is becoming increasingly rare in contemporary painting.

Comeau’s paintings offer glorious juxtapositions of hard and soft, with their narrow corners and walls protruding into nowhere. They are improbable floor plans, with bursts of cloud and shadow obscuring the clean geometry of the sites. Greys and muted tones are shocked with unexpected regions of bright colour. These pops of red or blue or green become the focal points of the works. These paintings do not seem grounded in any reality that I have experienced, and yet I am inclined to try to unscramble each locale and try to discern what makes each canvas (and, by extension, each space depicted) so uncanny and disembodied while they are still warm with human presence.